Emesary MFD bridge

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Objective

Document ongoing talks and ideas about using the Emesary framework to provide a sane interfacing mechanism for Canvas based avionics (and lower-level MapStructure building blocks]] using Richard's Canvas MFD Framework.

Background

Over time, the NavDisplay code has become a huge mess - it is far from being easily maintainable, yet it is the most widely used Canvas-based MFD in use today. So there are some lessons to be learnt from the whole experience.

Nasal modules

• fgdata/Nasal/canvas/MFD_Generic.nas
• fgdata/Nasal/emesary.nas

Design Goals

Screenshot showing a PUI dialog with two NavDisplay instances, featuring support for customizable resolution/size of the ND as well as selectable number of NDs to be shown.

See also Howto:Prototyping a new NavDisplay Style.

The NavDisplay code is structured to support:

• GUI-based prototyping and design/testing of layers
• truly indenpendent instances (an arbitrary number of them)
• styling of ND layers/components according to aircraft specifics (think Boeing vs. Airbus ND)
• encapsulate aircraft/system specifics (think differences between fdm, autopilot and route manager)
• encourage a modular and reusable design of additions, so that all aircraft developers using the framework can benefit automatically

Implementation

We will be hooking up the Canvas MFD framework to a conventional Canvas GUI dialog, so that a MFD instrument can be shown in a standalone GUI dialog. The next step will involve using the Emesary framework to create custom events and actions.

Instantiating a MFD Dialog

See Howto:Creating a Canvas GUI dialog file for the main article about this subject.

Related

References